Happiness TED Talk Lesson by Christina Chabali (Brazil ETA)
Engaging university students and getting them to interact with each other in English can be difficult; so many of the games and activities that get primary or secondary students excited simply do not work on these young adults, leaving their instructors scrambling to find ways to avoid simply talking at them for the entire period of the class.
If you’re looking for ways to have your university-level students chat comfortably and get to know one another in English, check out this “Happiness TED Talk Lesson” by Brazil ETA Christina Chabali (originally posted on the Latin American Teaching Collab site). For this lesson, students watch a ~12 minute video of a TED Talk given by writer Emily Esfahani Smith in which she discusses four pillars of happiness. Following the video, students are asked to apply these pillars to their own lives and share their thoughts with fellow students in progressively shorter intervals of time.
You can find Christina’s lesson plan and link for the video here.
That’s it for August, but remember to keep checking back in September for more great lessons!